Our website uses cookies to improve your user experience. If you continue browsing, we assume that you consent to our use of cookies. More information can be found in our Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy.

As of April 1, the Financial Services Authority has been replaced by two new bodies, the Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA), which regulates the operations of financial organisations, and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which monitors how financial organisations treat consumers.

As far as the FCA is concerned, whether financial organisations choose to communicate over social media channels or in print, the rules remain the same.

The communication must be clear, fair and not misleading, regardless of which channel the message is broadcast over.

The FCA has already stated its intention to monitor what financial organisations are getting up to on social media, and it uses Twitter itself.

The question of permission and customers rights regarding marketing material is one that has privacy evangelists and marketers head to head. Many forms of direct marketing can be seen by the recipients as intrusive and disturbing and this has led to a bit of a backlash.

In some cases, this has spawned legislation (as in TPS in the UK) and in others, poor publicity via the national media and threats of further control from politicians.

But, out of all of the different direct marketing channels, email seems to be the quietest when it comes to public outrage.

For those of you who didn’t read this headline in February, an irate father charged into a Target store demanding they stop targeting his teenage daughter with emails full of baby products because she wasn’t pregnant. It turns out Target was right, and the father was wrong. She was pregnant and her shift in product purchase at Target made the marketers behind the brand know of her news before any of the world may have known.

Jason Scoggins of Freshpair stressed that targeting has to go through a “creep” filter and in the case of the Target example, they went too far.

For more than a decade, companies in the United States operating websites that collect data from children have been required to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

At the time COPPA was implemented, the internet ecosystem was far less mature, and the law didn’t cover all of the parties that today frequently collect data from children. So yesterday, the FTC published a proposal (PDF) with the intent of modifying COPPA to ensure that parties not currently governed by COPPA’s rules are covered.

For large organizations like the BBC, ignoring the recently-enacted EU cookie law probably isn’t a viable option. Despite the headaches associated with implementing a solution, the threat of legal actions and fines probably outweighs the costs of compliance.

It’s a different story for entrepreneurs and owners of small businesses, some of whom indicated a willingness to flout the law until given a reason to reconsider.

Marketers have been paying celebrities to endorse their products and services for decades, so it’s no surprise that there’s a booming market for celebrity endorsements via their social media profiles.

With the help of companies like Ad.ly, celebrities and ‘influencers’ are reportedly earning thousands upon thousands of dollars for a single tweet or Facebook status update.

In the United States, marketers paying high-profile individuals to tweet and blog about their products worried the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) so much that it developed guidelines around the practice.

Enforcing copyright online has proven to be quite difficult. More than a decade after Napster brought the subject of digital piracy into the mainstream, content owners are still struggling to protect their rights on the internet. They have finally learned one thing though: suing grandmothers (and dead grandmothers) doesn’t work.

So what are content owners doing? It appears they are turning their attention to a more receptive audience: politicians.

How important is ‘network neutrality‘? In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission thinks it’s such a big deal that it’s willing to completely ignore court rulings and potentially even Congress in its altruistic effort to ‘protect consumers.‘

But in a rare example of thoughtful governmental restraint, Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, has determined that network neutrality may not be all that it’s cracked up to be.

For years, a small region in the western United States has served as a Mecca for
technology entrepreneurs looking to follow in the footsteps of all the
great founders who built their companies in a place known as Silicon
Valley.

Companies including Intel, Apple, Google and Facebook, just to name a few, were all started in Silicon Valley, which is recognized the world over as the premiere source of so much technological innovation.

But are Silicon Valley’s better days behind it? Silicon Valley is located
in California, which was recently named the worst state to do business in
the United States according to Chief Executive Magazine’s annual Best
and Worst States for Business survey. It’s the second year in a row the
state has earned the distinction.